Ah, How Great It Is

The Reds had won the 1976 World Series only minutes earlier, vanquishing New York in the chill of an October evening as if the Yankees were no more of a challenge to their supremacy than a sandlot team from the Bronx. Sparky Anderson, the affable Cincinnati manager, smiled triumphantly before television lights that made a crown of his silver hair and stars of his damp eyes.

It was time for Anderson to explain how he had come to be such a genius. But he is a skilled practitioner of false modesty who forever downplays his contributions to his team's achievements. The Yankees did not win a game in this Series, so Sparky's strategy certainly did not get in the way; still he preferred to emphasize his occasional mistakes, to apologize for his abysmal ignorance, to construct an image of himself as the father, proud yet confused, of a gifted child. His function, as he saw it during the media confrontations that abounded at the Series, was to act as press agent for his team. After the Reds had won the third Series game by a score of 6-2, he had ventured the opinion that the Big Red Machine "might be one of the great teams of all time." Now, following the fourth win, in which the Reds buried the Yanks 7-2 with four runs in the ninth inning, he was asked if he suspected that his ambitious claim was justified.

"I wanted a chance for this club to be rated," he told the newsmen. "Now it's up to you to do that."

Actually, the rating game was already being played. It began as a rainy-day diversion when the fourth game had been postponed. Everyone from Joe DiMaggio to Joe Garagiola had been asked to compare the Reds with memorable teams of the past. Invariably, the experts backed away from the question, fearful of being dismissed as fogeys or denounced as traitors to their own generations. It was impossible, they usually protested, to compare teams of different eras.

That's true—to a point. A team should be measured by what it accomplishes in its own time. The 1976 Reds will never play the 1927 Yankees, but they sure knocked the starch out of the 1976 Yankees. Cincinnati swept New York by winning Games 3 and 4 in the House That Ruth Built—and others remodeled—and in the process the Reds embarrassed the Yanks with their daring on the bases, exposed the arms of the New York outfielders as being no more fibrous than strands of pasta and used their belittled pitching staff to limit the Yankees to an average of two runs a game.

New York Catcher Thurman Munson, whose .529 Series average was the best ever for a player on a losing team, fought the good fight, but he was upstaged by his glamorous Cincinnati counterpart, Johnny Bench, who batted .533 and drove home five runs with two homers in the climactic fourth game. Munson was further undone when Anderson extolled the incomparable virtues of his own catcher while Munson stood silently by in the press interview room under the stands. "Don't embarrass anyone by comparing him with Johnny Bench," Anderson advised the newsmen. Munson, who felt he had been unfavorably compared, was deeply embarrassed nonetheless. And so were his teammates. Confronted then with the only Yankees available to them, the Reds had turned the Series into the First Battle of Bull Run.

And that only served to heighten speculation about just how good the Reds are. Now that the A's, world champions of 1972, '73 and '74, have been destroyed by their creator, the Reds are the glamour team of baseball. And because they have the same eight players in their lineup almost every day, it is all the easier to liken them to some of the famous combinations of history.

Not that anyone is prepared to compare the Reds' motley pitching staff with such stately rotations as Jim Palmer, Mike Cuellar, Dave McNally and Pat Dobson of the 1971 Orioles or Mike Garcia, Bob Lemon, Early Wynn and Bob Feller of the 1954 Indians. But the Reds' pitchers, whoever they are, won their Series; the Orioles and the Indians fell flat on their reputations in theirs. That says something for Anderson's share-the-labor philosophy, which holds that the complete game is no criterion for success. His starters hold off the opposition for as long as seems reasonable, then are succeeded by the rabble out there in the bullpen. Reds pitchers completed only 33 of 162 games this season, while the '54 Indians finished 77 of 154 and the '71 Orioles lasted through 71 of 158. Nonetheless, the Reds won 102 regular-season contests and, for their most extraordinary accomplishment, seven straight postseason games—three in the playoffs and four in the Series.

After a season like that, conglomerate pitching may become the wave of the future. Indeed, if Anderson is to be commended for managerial brilliance, it should be for his manipulation of his staff. A Reds starter, unless he is a healthy Don Gullett (and there are none of those), will not grow famous under Anderson's stewardship, but he will get rich in October. Captain Hook is not all bad.

So even pitching staffs can be compared. The old Indians might serve up a Lemon; the new Reds will toss a Billingham-Borbon-Eastwick salad. Baseball lends itself to such comparisons because it is not so much a game of inches as of decimal points. The numbers, the inevitable "stats," reveal certain truths. It is true that the conditions in which batting averages, slugging percentages and homer and RBI totals are accumulated will not always be comparable. Not everyone plays the game on grass anymore, and the stadiums are less idiosyncratic in conformation. Styles change. There have been long-ball and dead-ball eras, periods when base stealing was considered an essential offensive weapon and when it was thought suicidal. In one of those rainy-day interviews last week DiMaggio quoted Connie Mack (now there is a parlay for you) as saying that the game changes every 15 years. The prospect of someone beating out 37 infield hits, as the Reds' Ken Griffey did this year while playing most of his games on artificial surfaces, was unthinkable when DiMaggio and his fellow Bronx Bombers were reaching base through the simple expedient of hitting the ball against or over the fence.